The proliferation of digital data for both personal and professional uses, in the form of electronic media such as music, documents, pictures, videos, passwords, among other types of electronic media and digital data, has led to a significant need for secure and reliable digital storage. With the advent of “cloud” computing, significant amounts of both personal and professional digital data is uploaded and saved to vast public servers that can be accessed from any internet connection.
As can be readily appreciated, some digital data is in fact of a sensitive nature, and the digital data owner desires that the digital data should be stored in an encrypted form that can only be decrypted by a data assignee that will receive the digital data at some future point in time. In other words, the data owner does not want the digital storage provided to be accessible by any unauthorized party. By way of a non-limiting example, a data owner may desire to store a sensitive document, such as a will, in an encrypted manner and only permit a designated executor to have the ability to decrypt the will. In this way, data owners can safely and securely store sensitive data without having any concerns that the integrity of the digital data will be compromised, such as in the event that the digital storage provider will be hacked by a rogue third party.
Further, data owners often want to safely store their digital data for an extended period and then transfer it to a data assignee upon some subsequent event that can occur in the future. To extend the example given above, a data owner may want to transfer the encrypted will to the designated executor upon the data owner's death.
Various prior art solutions exist for storing and transferring digital data, however there are no presently available solutions that allow a data owner to encrypt digital data, store the encrypted data on a third-party server such that the third party cannot access and view the encrypted data whilst providing future-proof access to the encrypted data and a suitable decryption process to a data assignee upon the verified occurrence of a previously determined event, such as a birthday of the data assignee or the death of the data owner, among any other previously determined event that will be readily contemplated by the suitably skilled person.
US 2004/0098366 discloses a method and system for secure electronic storage of private personal data preferably held in trust on behalf of a preselected corporation or natural person. Data owners and authorized persons gain access to accessible data to undertake permitted tasks.
WO97/21162 discloses a service methodology for time-based availability of content provisioned on a storage medium, wherein time is measured, and responsive to the measured time, access to the data content is permitted.
GB 2,403,382 discloses a method wherein a consumer is able to request encrypted content data from a content issuer for storage. At the predetermined time an encryption key is sent to the consumer to permit decryption of the encrypted content.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,603,857 discloses a method and apparatus for controlling release of time sensitive information by a server that establishes access information for a specific future time that only becomes active once that time has passed.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,224,725 discloses a method and system for escrowing digital data by receiving escrow conditions for releasing the escrowed data and an escrow recipient. An escrow contract is then created based on the specified parameters. When the condition has been satisfied, the escrow data is released to an escrow recipient.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,856,414 discloses a system and method for permanently archiving intellectual property in a digital archival system.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,716,732 discloses techniques for secure online storage where a user is registered for securely storing documents on a network server. The user documents can be viewed remotely upon receipt of a user security identifier. The user documents include documents for disposing and utilizing the user documents upon the occurrence of death or medical circumstances.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,441,277 discloses an electronic deposit box system and a related method of controlling access to electronic information, particularly suitable for electronic tendering.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,092,201 discloses a method and apparatus for extending secure communication operations via shared lists accomplished by creating a shared list in accordance with authorization parameters by one user and subsequently accessing the shared list via the authorization parameters by a group of users including the first user.
U.S. Pat. No. 7,421,741 discloses a system and method for encrypting digital content in a digital container and securely locking the encrypted content to a particular user and or computer or other computing device.
However, there is a need for a future-proof method and system that provides the event-trigger release of encrypted digital data from a data owner to a data assignee through a third party, such that only the third party provides access to the encryption and decryption process for encrypting or decrypting the data by and at the designated sender's or recipient's system respectively.
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.